Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/82

 by their manner of speech from the Yankee children. On the other hand, in communities made up wholly or mainly of Germans, the grandchildren continue to have trouble with the th sound in English words, and manifest other linguistic peculiarities. And this difference is merely symptomatic. To this day, it is easy to reconstruct, in case of the average person of German descent, the atmosphere in which he was brought up. If he comes from Milwaukee, or from some rural "Dutch settlement," that fact is usually clear from a hundred trifling intimations. If he was brought up in a non-German community (so adaptable is the race), a change of name from the German Weiss to the English White, or from Schwartz to Black, would ordinarily suffice to disguise the fact that he is of German descent at all. Germans thus brought up are apt to have made their religious affiliations and their intimate social relationships harmonize with those of the leading American element of the community, so that these quite as much as their speech would tend to conceal their racial origin.

Wisconsin writers have made much of the fact that emigrating German revolutionists came to this state largely in 1848 and the years following. That fact, significant as bringing to Wisconsin Carl Schurz, who became the most noted liberal American statesman and publicist of German birth, has perhaps been overstressed. At least, it can safely be said that for every revolutionist disembarked at Milwaukee or Sheboygan or Manitowoc, probably a full score of plain, everyday, conventional Germans filtered into the state's population during the same time. The important point about the revolutionists is not their relative numbers, but their character and the leadership they helped to supply in the affairs of the new commonwealth. Newspaper editors who possessed exceptional literary and scholastic attainments came from that class; some found their way into the legislature, and